'Recipe for disaster' | DEA changing tactics to combat fentanyl trafficking as overdoses skyrocket | Crime Reports

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The Drug Enforcement Administration is sounding the alarm, weeks after 14 people in Louisville were indicted for trafficking fentanyl and other drugs.

The DEA is calling fentanyl the main ingredient in a recipe for disaster as more people overdose on it, with many purchasing and taking it thinking it's another drug they intended to buy.

Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin, and the DEA said people are cutting drugs with fentanyl, then using pill presses to make realistic looking prescription drugs which are then sold to unsuspecting buyers as Xanax or Adderall, even Oxycodone.

Agents said it's happening in our own backyard, and it's deadly.

Earlier this week, a man in Floyd County, Indiana was sentenced to 30 years in prison for trafficking in fentanyl. Prosecutors said Shannon Houchin was caught with 23 grams of fentanyl. That's 12,000 lethal doses -- enough to kill 14 percent of the county's residents.

"It's like a recipe," said Erek Davodowich, the assistant special agent in charge for the DEA's Louisville Field Division. "It's a recipe for disaster is what it is."

Two milligrams of fentanyl can be deadly, according to the DEA. That's an amount small enough to fit on the tip of a pencil. And many people don't even realize they're taking it, since fentanyl can be made to look exactly like common pharmaceutical drugs, and it can also be laced with other drugs.

"We've started to look at this a little bit differently, because a lot of people that die from a fentanyl poisoning, they never knew that they ingested fentanyl," Davodowich said. "It wasn't their intention to ingest fentanyl."

In all his years in the DEA, Davodowich has never seen anything the fentanyl crisis, and he calls it a severe public health threat.

"We're attacking all levels," Davodowich said. "We're attacking the entire supply chain. We're going as far back as China, where the precursor chemicals are being used to make fentanyl."

The DEA's mission is to defeat two cartels that he says are flooding our country with fentanyl, which in turn floods our city. Recently, the DEA worked with other agencies to investigate, arrest and indict 14 people in Louisville -- and some of those defendants are facing drug charges involving fentanyl.

Last year the DEA seized more than 77 million fentanyl pills and about 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder across the country. That equates to about 386 million deadly doses of the drug.

"That is enough to kill every single American in the United States," Davodowich said.

The CDC is predicting record numbers of drug poisonings in 2023, estimating that 112,323 Americans lost their lives from drug overdoses. Nearly 70 percent of those poisonings were from fentanyl.

As the DEA continues to combat the problem internationally with its 334 offices across the world, Davodowich is warning everyone not to buy any pills on the street or from anyone on social media or the dark web.

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